New Nationalism: The Natural Home for the Disillusioned Left

For the better part of a century, the American Left has been told a lie: that socialism and patriotism are incompatible, and that to be a socialist is to be an internationalist first and an American second, that the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, and love for the American way of life belong to the Right Wing alone. This narrative has been repeated so often that it has become an article of faith, a sacred truth that no “good socialist” dares question. But like most unquestioned dogmas, it collapses under the weight of historical fact. The truth, as it so often goes, is far more interesting, and far more damning to the orthodoxies of the contemporary New Left.

The truth is that the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist. The salute that accompanied it (the outstretched arm that predated the Nazi salute by decades) was invented by a socialist. The first mass socialist movement in American history, the Nationalist Clubs of the 1880s and 1890s, was explicitly patriotic both in name and orientation. A century ago, the Socialist Party of America's own “right wing” (which rejected communism and supported the Great War) stood together and decided that it was time to outgrow socialism. These socialists of the early 20th century discovered that the internationalist fantasy was dead, that the working class was American first, and that the only vehicle capable of delivering economic justice was the nation itself.

This is the tradition that the New Nationalists of America (NNA) now carries forward. This is the truth that the contemporary New Left has buried, and one that that every disillusioned socialist who has grown tired of performative activism and identity politics, needs to hear: behind every true patriot lies a disillusioned socialist, and the NNA is where that disillusionment finds its natural home.

The Patriotic Origins of American Socialism

This story begins in 1888, when a young Massachusetts writer named Edward Bellamy published a work of utopian fiction: Looking Backward, 2000-1887. The novel told the story of a 19th-century capitalist who awakens in the year 2000 to find that a non-violent revolution has transformed the American economy and society; private property has been abolished in favor of state ownership of capital, and war, poverty, crime, and corruption have been eliminated. The book was a sensation. Within a year, it had sold some 200,000 copies, and by the end of the 19th century, it had sold more copies than any other book published in America outside of Uncle Tom's Cabin. More importantly, a new political movement spontaneously emerged, dedicated to making Bellamy's utopian vision a practical reality: The Nationalist Movement, based upon the organization of local Nationalist Clubs. At least 165 Nationalist Clubs were formed by so-called "Bellamyites," who hoped to remake the economy and society through the nationalization of industry. The clubs attracted such notable personalities as author Edward Everett Hale and Christian socialist William Dean Howells. Their magazine, The Nationalist, served as the national organ of this socialist political movement. These clubs were explicitly socialist. Their purpose was to create and promote the practical realization of Bellamy's vision. But they were also explicitly nationalist; they chose the name "Nationalist" precisely because of the negative associations with the term "socialism" in the American mind. The Nationalist Clubs were the first American movement to fuse socialism with patriotism. They believed that the nation, not the private corporation, should direct the American economy. They believed that the United States was the stage for the redemption of all of humankind. They were socialists who loved their country, and they understood a truth that the modern Left has forgotten: The fundamental fact that internationalism is merely a luxury for those who have already secured their own nation's future.

Edward Bellamy's first cousin, Francis Bellamy, was a Christian socialist and former Baptist minister who was pushed out of his post for delivering sermons on such topics as "Jesus the Socialist." In 1892, Francis Bellamy authored the Pledge of Allegiance, a ritual he intended as a call for national unity based on equality and social justice. Bellamy was not merely an active Christian socialist, but a founding member of Boston's first Nationalist Club. The original salute accompanying the pledge was the Bellamy salute, extending the right arm toward the American flag with the hand outstretched. The Bellamy salute was first demonstrated on October 21, 1892. The irony in all of this, is that the socialists who created the Pledge of Allegiance and the salute understood something else that their modern descendants have also forgotten: that patriotism is not the enemy of social justice. Patriotism is necessary for social justice to ever exist in the first place. One cannot fight for the welfare of a people one does not love, and one cannot love a people that one refuses to recognize as a nation.

The Socialist Party's Right Wing

Alongside the Nationalist Clubs stands one of the most interesting movements in American history: The Socialist Party of America (SPA), initially founded in 1901. By 1912, the SPA had grown to over 120,000 members. Its greatest fractures emerged in the wake of the First World War, originally referred to simply as the Great War. While the party's left wing (led by Eugene Debs) opposed American intervention in the Great War, its right wing both supported the War and embraced American patriotism, and the most influential figures in this right wing were not fringe characters on the periphery of the SPA. These men were the executives of the Socialist Party itself.

We should begin with John Spargo. Spargo was a leading SPA intellectual, a Methodist preacher who first attempted to meld the Protestant Social Gospel with ideological socialism. At the 1917 National Convention of the Socialist Party, Spargo was the author of a minority resolution calling for American support of the Allied war effort. This proposal was decisively defeated, garnering the support of only 5 delegates. When the party's membership enthusiastically endorsed the anti-war line, Spargo resigned his seat on the party's National Executive Committee and then resigned from the party itself. But Spargo did not drop out of politics. He conceived of the pro-war American Alliance for Labor and Democracy, which together with Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor, he subsequently helped lead. He also joined the Social Democratic League of America (SDL), a patriotic, pro-war organization, and was chosen as its first Chairman. Spargo conceived of the SDL as a group akin to the Independent Labour Party in England and sought to involve it in a broader pro-war organization analogous to the British Labour Party; he conceived of this broader group, the National Party, and sat on its Executive Committee. Spargo's views shifted following the Bolshevik Revolution, leading to a staunch anti-communist stance reflected in his work Bolshevism: The Enemy of Political & Industrial Democracy (1919). But Spargo went further. He composed the Colby Note that officially formalized the Wilson administration’s anti-communist doctrine. By the middle 1920s, Spargo became a member of the Republican Party and supported the presidency of Calvin Coolidge, and later, Barry Goldwater. Through it all, John Spargo never abandoned his core principles. But in his maturity, he recognized the fact that the internationalist fantasy was a dead end, that the working class could only be served through the nation, and that the enemy of the worker was not inherently the employer, but the communist who sought to destroy the nation itself.

Another name that stands out in American history is William English Walling. Walling was born into wealth in Louisville, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School. He founded the National Women's Trade Union League in 1903, and deeply moved by his investigation of the Springfield Race Riot of 1908, he co-founded the NAACP in 1909. Though he was a member of the Socialist Party of America, when the party took a stand against America’s involvement in World War 1, he quit. Walling believed that America’s participation in the Great War was necessary to defeat the Central Powers, which he saw as reactionary and contrary to the principles of human progress. Walling was a socialist, a founder of the NAACP, a champion of women's labor rights, and he chose American patriotism over party loyalty. William English Walling is yet another fine example of a man who recognized that his principles demanded that he choose his country over his party. Walling knew better than most that the cause of racial justice and labor rights could not be advanced in a nation that had been defeated or weakened by its enemies.

It is here that we find Graham Phelps Stokes, "the millionaire Socialist." Born into one of New York City's most prosperous families, he was a founding member of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. He joined the SPA in 1906 and was elected to the party's National Executive Committee in 1908. With the entrance of the United States into the First World War, Stokes was caught in the midst of a personal crisis between his love of country, and the pacifism that prevailed in socialist circles. Stokes joined the Coast Artillery, in which he later became major. Like many socialists, Stokes discovered that national patriotism mattered more than vague promises of international brotherhood. Over the course of the war, he eventually split with the Socialist Party of America over the question of American intervention. This caused a fracture with his Communist wife, and they were divorced in 1925. This was the arc of a man who followed his convictions wherever they led, even when they led him away from the comfortable orthodoxies of his peers.

Allan Benson, the Socialist Party's candidate for President in 1916, joined Spargo, Walling, and Stokes in announcing his intention to resign from the party unless it repudiated its anti-war stance. Benson agreed with Spargo that the committee which drew up the resolution was "permeated by pro-German sympathies." Meyer London, a three-term Socialist congressman from New York's Lower East Side, had opposed the war before it began but supported war appropriations after it was announced, arguing "when war is an accomplished fact, then there must be unity." Even Morris Hillquit, often portrayed as the standard-bearer of anti-war socialism, personally defended the war socialists, blocked the membership's attempt to censure Meyer London, and told the New Republic: "I do not advocate an immediate separate peace, a withdrawal by America... I want America to act, not to withdraw." Hillquit argued that "national feeling... stands for everything we hold dear... the workingman has a country as well as a class."

Algie Martin Simons was one of the most significant figures in American socialism. He was a founding member of the Socialist Party of America and the editor of the International Socialist Review for nearly a decade. Simons was a nationalist who hoped to make socialism the American alternative. In 1917, he was appointed on a pro-war "labor delegation" to the government of revolutionary Russia headed by the patriotic Russian socialist, Alexander Kerensky. Eventually, Kerensky’s government was overthrown, and in its place stood the communist regime of Vladimir Lenin, which Simons stood in bitter opposition too. Upton Sinclair, the famed muckraking author of The Jungle, and a heavy inspiration upon Theodore Roosevelt, was one of America's most prominent socialists. Yet when World War I broke out, Sinclair surprised many by supporting the war effort. Sinclair's commitment to anti-communism was just as significant as his commitment to social justice. In 1934, he joined the Democratic Party and ran as Governor of California. WJ Ghent was another American socialist journalist and writer. Ghent first became interested in socialism in 1892, joining one of the Bellamy Clubs and initially espousing the English socialist ideals of Fabianism. He served as secretary for Socialist Congressman, Victor L. Berger. After the United States entered World War 1, Ghent left the Socialist Party and spent his later years writing essays against the Communist Party from a Social Democratic perspective.

Charles Edward Russell was yet another influential American journalist, muckraker, and socialist. Russell joined the Socialist Party in 1908, and even ran for governor of New York on the Socialist ticket in 1909, but by 1916 his views had shifted, and in 1917, he was expelled from the Socialist Party due to his support for American involvement in World War One. Russell went on to serve as a member of the American mission to Russia and worked as an agent of Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information. Robert Rives La Monte, an editor for the International Socialist Review, had, by 1917, also joined the other pro-war socialists who broke from the Socialist Party to support American involvement in the World War.

In 1917, Spargo, Walling, Stokes, and other pro-war socialists including La Monte, formed the Social Democratic League of America (SDL), an American political party established by reform-minded visionaries who favored American intervention in the Great War. Led by such intellectuals as Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, the Social Democratic League was a non-partisan national society to propagandize the socialist idea. The adherents of the Socialist Right first formed this organization before they joined an even broader pro-War coalition. The Social Democratic League worked closely with the National Party, a national organization founded by patriotic Socialists who had defected from the SPA in 1917. The National Party brought together pro-war socialists, adherents of the Nonpartisan League, the Prohibition Party, and the Single Tax movement. Veterans of Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, the Prohibitionists, the suffragists, and the Socialists, all began to talk amongst themselves about the possibility of uniting their forces in a new political organization. These men bravely, and in the face of great adversity, chose patriotism over pacifism, nationalism over internationalism, the nation over class. They understood that the socialist dream could only be realized within the framework of a strong and sovereign nation.

The famous veterans’ association known as the American Legion, initially founded in the aftermath of World War One in 1919, itself contained socialists, and its support for veterans' benefits made it a vehicle for the same kind of socialist nationalism that the aforementioned right wing SPA members had all embraced. The veterans' movements of the post-war period would have never agreed with the way that modern conservative institutions have cared for war veterans. After all, these associations were vehicles for a nationalism that demanded the state serve its citizens, that demanded the nation honor its obligations to those who had served it.

American Socialism

Woodrow Wilson, the progressive president who led America through the Great War and championed the League of Nations, understood that socialism required nationalism better than anyone. In his 1887 essay "Socialism and Democracy," Wilson argued that true socialism and true democracy are, in their fundamental theory, indistinguishable. In his own words, "They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members". Wilson further argued that the difference between democracy and socialism was merely a difference of organization and policy, not one of "primary motive”. When the Great War came, Wilson observed firsthand the failure of socialist internationalism. In a 1919 speech, he declared: "The appeal to patriotism of each man in the countries that have been at war was too great to be overcome by socialists. We thought that socialism would prevent the successful carrying on of the war in some nations, but this was disproved". Wilson was no communist. He was, in his own words, a progressive nationalist, who believed the state should serve the nation. And Wilson knew that when forced to choose between internationalist ideology and patriotic conviction, true socialists would, and did, choose their country. The SPA right wing's choice to support the war was the natural human response that Wilson himself observed and acknowledged.

Theodore Roosevelt, the man whose "New Nationalism" gives the NNA its name, understood this trajectory as well. When his critics derided him as a socialist for defending the workingman, he refused to be intimidated. In his autobiography, he recounted how many had referred to him as a Socialist due to the things he accomplished on behalf of the workingman. Not merely was Roosevelt unafraid of being branded as a Socialist, but he in fact expressed his belief that “many American Socialists are high-minded and honorable citizens". He continued on, "They are oppressed by the brutalities and industrial injustices which we see everywhere about us … The principles or methods which the Socialists advocate and which I believe to be in the interest of the people I support, and those which I believe to be against the interest of the people I oppose".

Socialism, if it were defined as protecting the weak from the powerful, was in fact a term that Roosevelt explicitly identified with. In his own words, "If socialism is really defined as not letting the privileged run over the less fortunate, then I am guilty. If socialism is about fair play, then I am guilty. If socialism is about helping the less fortunate, or less able, then I am guilty".

The “Bolsheviks of the Right”

The patriotic socialist tradition did not end with World War I. It re-emerged in the Cold War, and it produced some of the most ferocious defenders of the working class that America has ever seen. The architects of this transformation were disillusioned socialists who took their passion for justice, their commitment to the vulnerable, and their hatred of exploitation, and redirected it from internationalist fantasy to the defense of their own nation.

The story begins with Max Shachtman, the former chief American lieutenant of Leon Trotsky. Throughout his life, Shachtman never abandoned his devotion to the working class. In 1945, he declared that socialists want "comfort and prosperity, instead of low living standards, slums, child labor, unemployment, hunger and starvation". He argued that "free enterprise cannot guarantee you security, it cannot guarantee you a decent living, it cannot guarantee that you will be able to raise a family the way it ought to be raised". Shachtman developed close ties with the great civil rights and labor leader, Bayard Rustin, and was extremely important for the work of the United Auto Workers union. His organization, later known as Social Democrats, USA, believed that the American labor movement needed to play an important role in advancing civil rights and economic justice, and to this end, he worked to organize trade unions. Shachtman's Social Democrats supported both the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs Invasion against Communist Cuba. He proceeded to take over the old Socialist Party apparatus in the late 1950s.

During the Reagan administration, a number of similar ex-Marxists were given key positions in the government, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, the US delegate to the United Nations, and Carl Gershman, the first president of the National Endowment for Democracy. These socialists found their true calling in defending human dignity and the working class against the threat of communism. Jeane Kirkpatrick began her political journey where many socialists begin: as a college freshman in 1945, she joined the Young People's Socialist League. Even after her political evolution, she never joined Reagan’s economically libertarian conservatism. In one interview, she defined herself as a "welfare state liberal", arguing that the state needed to maintain its role in defending the dignity of the vulnerable. For Kirkpatrick, the common welfare and true democracy were inseparable. She rejected the modern Democratic Party's approach to welfare not because she opposed social spending, but because she believed it "was damaging to the people who were the supposed beneficiaries". She never wavered in her commitment to the vulnerable, always of the simple conviction that self-reliance was the true path to human dignity.

Irving Kristol, often called the godfather of “neoconservatism”, was himself a Marxist in his youth. Kristol explained that he learned to think and theorize from the Trotskyites. But unlike the supposed neoliberal caricature of him, Kristol and his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb were children of the Depression, who were deeply loyal to the economy that FDR’s New Deal had produced. At City College of New York in the late 1930s, he belonged to "Alcove No. 1", a lunchroom clique of maybe thirty socialist radicals, where he was a card-carrying member of the Young People's Socialist League, Fourth International. It was there, arguing for hours with classmates who'd go on to become some of the century's most influential sociologists, that Kristol learned to think ideologically. What broke the spell was the US Army. Drafted as an infantryman, Kristol went in expecting to find the raw material of the coming socialist order in the common soldier. What he found instead convinced him that building socialism around the working man as he actually existed, rather than the idealized version in his reading, was pure fantasy. He came out no longer a socialist of any kind. What survived the turn rightward, however, was his conviction that the state owed its citizens more than a market could deliver on its own, and not merely in the form that LBJ’s Great Society offered. Kristol argued that America's two most durable, least controversial reforms (Social Security and free public schooling) succeeded precisely because they were universal, given to rich and poor alike, rather than means-tested. He proposed a children's allowance paid to every family, arguing that it would do more for the poor and that it would do so without dividing the country into "poor" and "nonpoor" camps competing for a stigmatized handout. The point of social reform, in his view, was in building a shared sense of national belonging that a targeted check never could.

Christopher Hitchens was one of the most brilliant and combative intellectuals of his generation, and one of the clearest examples of the socialist turned patriot. In his youth, Hitchens was a socialist and Trotskyist ideologue, who joined the Labour Party in Britain and was active in the Trotskyist International. He wrote for left-wing publications and was, by his own admission, a Marxist in good standing. But when Hitchens saw that the Left was abandoning the working class for the theater of identity politics, making common cause with tyrants in the name of anti-imperialism, and refusing to defend the very values (free speech, human rights, democracy) that had once been its calling cards, he turned away from it. Over the course of his life, Christopher Hitchens developed a deep, scholarly appreciation for the American Enlightenment tradition. Particularly, he fell in love with its two greatest radical voices: Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. He wrote books on both men. His Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (2005) brought Jefferson to life as a man of his time. His admiration for Paine was even more personal, as he saw Paine's Rights of Man as forming the philosophical basis of America itself. In the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, and the Left’s response to the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens became an advocate of America's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Hitchens saw in America the only force capable of defending Enlightenment values against the new barbarism. He believed that with the rise of new religious theocracies, the world faced a threat no less dangerous than Nazism or Stalinism, and that America was the only nation with the will and power to confront it.

What Does This Mean?

If you are a socialist who has grown disillusioned with the New Left, tired of performative activism, tired of identity politics that divide rather than unite, tired of a movement that hates its own country, your natural home is the NNA. The NNA does not ask you to abandon your commitment to the working class. It asks you to recognize that the working class is American first, that the nation is the only vehicle capable of delivering economic justice, that internationalism has failed, that the corporations that exploit workers are the same corporations that profit from open borders and free trade. The NNA does not ask you to become either a conservative or a liberal. But it does ask you to recognize that the Left has abandoned the working class, that the Democratic Party serves the donor class, that the Republican Party serves the corporate class, and that only a movement rooted in American producerism can deliver the industrial revival, the labor power, and the economic dignity that socialism promised, yet has never completely delivered.

The contemporary Left has lost its way. It has traded the struggle for the worker's dignity for the abstract pursuit of a delusional internationalist fantasy. It has traded the love of country for the love of a cosmopolitan party elite that despises the working class. It has traded the reality of class struggle for the theater of identity politics. But the socialists who actually built the American labor movement, who actually fought for the labor rights, who actually understood the nature of the struggle, they were American patriots. They loved their country because they loved their countrymen.

The NNA offers a way back. It offers a return to the tradition of Bellamy, of the socialists who knew that the worker's identity is national before it is class-based. It offers a program of industrial revival, of labor, of the guarantee of a job for every citizen. It offers a rejection of the neoliberal consensus that has gutted the American working class. And it offers a vision of the nation as the instrument of economic justice.

Today, the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America calls for "greater worker control of workplaces and a transition toward public ownership of major corporations and critical industries.” The NNA goes further, proposing the empowerment of Labor Courts, the curation of community investment boards where employers and labor unions collectively decide on investments, and guaranteed employment for every citizen through a Civil Labor Corps. The DSA platform calls for a 32-hour work week, Medicare for All, free college education, public ownership of housing, permanent rent control, mandatory union membership, expanded paid family leave, and free universal childcare. The NNA supports these same goals, but through the nation, rather than in opposition to it. We believe that no American who is able and willing to work should ever be without a job. The DSA has over 100,000 members, but it is adrift, more focused on fighting for Palestinians, abolishing the Senate, and defunding law enforcement, than on the American worker. The NNA believes in a return to the socialist tradition that actually built the American labor movement, that actually fought for the worker, that actually understood that the nation is the only vehicle capable of supporting the working class. The DSA calls for defunding the Department of War, and lifting the embargoes on Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. We believe in no such subversive policies. We believe simply in rebuilding American industry, and defending the American worker against the corporations that have gutted their communities.

Behind every true patriot lies a disillusioned socialist. And behind every disillusioned socialist lies the New Nationalists of America, ready and willing to accept them with open arms. The contemporary Left has failed. It has abandoned the working class. It has abandoned the nation. It has abandoned the very concept of solidarity in favor of performative virtue. But the NNA offers a way back, a return to a socialist tradition which acknowledges that a worker's dignity depends on the nation's strength, that the multinational corporation depends on the nation's weakness, that internationalism is the enemy of the working class.

Join the NNA and get active today. Reclaim social justice, and reclaim your country.